Early Game Layout — Year 1 Settlement

Your first year is about three things: food, fuel, and the path to Level-2 burgage plots. Everything else is a distraction. Here's the skeleton that gets you there without wasted construction.

The Year-1 build order

1. Hitching postfirst — it gives you an ox to drag logs and stone to your construction sites. Without haulage, your first buildings crawl. A second ox here pays for itself fast.
2. Logging camp at the forest edge. Logs feed your sawpit for planks and your families for firewood, so this is the spine of every early build.
3. Granary and storehouse side by side, near where the market will go. The granary holds food; the storehouse holds firewood, planks, hides, and clothing. Both stock the market stalls.
4. Marketplace next to the granary and storehouse so stalls restock with the shortest possible walk.
5. Wellcentered in your first burgage cluster — plots need water access to upgrade.
6. Four to six burgage plotswith vegetable gardens, all tight to the well and inside the marketplace's stall coverage.

Why this order matters

Each step unblocks the next. The ox moves the logs; the logs build the storage and market; the storage feeds the stalls; the stalls and well let your plots upgrade to Level 2. Build out of order — a workshop before storage, say — and you stall waiting on materials that have nowhere to go and nobody to carry them.

Lock down your supply chains

Two chains keep Year 1 alive. The fuel chainruns logging camp → firewood (the woodcutter's lodge splits logs into firewood) → storehouse → market stall; every home burns firewood through winter, so a gap here freezes approval. The plank chainruns logging camp → sawpit → storehouse, supplying the planks that every new building needs. Get both flowing before you expand housing.

Food variety for approval, not just quantity

Burgage plots want varietyof food, not a mountain of one item. A single food source caps your settlement's approval, which caps growth and upgrades. In Year 1 your variety comes cheaply from plot vegetable gardens, a forager hut for berries, and a hunting camp for meat. Three different foods in the granary is worth far more to approval than triple the vegetables alone.

The shape on the ground

Think of it as a small dense cluster: storage and market on one side, residential on the other, the well in the seam. The logging camp, forager, and hunting camp live on the outside near the resources they harvest. Keep the homes packed close so families spend their time at the stalls and their gardens, not walking.

Leave room to expand

The mistake that costs a Year-2 rebuild is sealing your town in on every side. Pick one open direction — toward flat, buildable land — and keep it clear of production buildings. That is where your second burgage cluster, future artisan plots, and eventually a church or second market will go. Workshops like the sawpit, smithy, and tannery come in Year 2 once you have leftover plank supply; reserve the space for them now so you are not demolishing homes to fit them later.

Watch your firewood before the first winter

Year 1 has a hard deadline: winter. Cold homes drain approval fast, and a settlement that runs out of firewood in its first January can spiral into people leaving. Stand up the logging camp and a woodcutter early, and let the storehouse build a firewood buffer through autumn. If you only protect one supply chain in Year 1, make it fuel — food shortages nudge approval down, but a freezing winter can end the run.

Common Year-1 mistakes to avoid

• Spreading out too far. Scenic, scattered homes look nice but push families outside market coverage and waste their time walking. Stay dense.
• One food source. Berries alone, or vegetables alone, caps approval. Stack two or three foods early.
• No ox. Skipping the hitching post leaves materials sitting in the forest and every build dragging.
• Rushing workshops. Artisan workshops before storage and food just starve your families of attention and resources.

Nail this Year-1 skeleton — ox, logs, storage, market, well, and a tight cluster of garden plots — and you arrive at Year 2 with Level-2 homes, a firewood buffer, and open land to grow into instead of a knot you have to untie.